Posts by cofty

92

Chance or intelligent design?

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

cofty could you answer how the single cell came about by chance?.

i know the argument for complexity in nature says natural selection over billions of years but this could not explain the complexity of the single cell the building blocks of life?.

cofty

the complexity coming over billions of years argument can’t apply to the simplest cell.

Why not?

Did you read my post above about endosymbiosis? Did you think about it or do any further reading? Do you want actual answers?

92

Chance or intelligent design?

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

cofty could you answer how the single cell came about by chance?.

i know the argument for complexity in nature says natural selection over billions of years but this could not explain the complexity of the single cell the building blocks of life?.

cofty

ExB - At least three people have responded to your Op with long and fact-filled posts. Your only reply is to paraphrase your OP.

Am I wasting my time?

38

“Lazarus, come out!”

by Fisherman in

many people here have expressed faith in evolution and in other theories—but in all honesty, do you have any hope whatsoever in your heart or in the back of your mind ?

truthfully..

cofty

What these professionals are saying

Bunch of ignorant charlatans

92

Chance or intelligent design?

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

cofty could you answer how the single cell came about by chance?.

i know the argument for complexity in nature says natural selection over billions of years but this could not explain the complexity of the single cell the building blocks of life?.

cofty

Please stop posting YouTube videos. What's the point? I could post videos of christians who are scientists completely demolishing Behe's ID bullshit but that isn't a conversation.

Study the topic until you can explain the ideas in your own words and you totally understand all the strongest arguments against your position. This is a discussion forum.

85

Physically in mentally agnostic ie sitting on the fence

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

hi everyone i’m not pimi or pimo i’m pima.. i don’t think the gb have everything right but i’m sitting on the fence that maybe they do some things.. if the great trib starts i will jump that side of the fence.. this is a definite little sneaky advantage dodging but even by their own doctrine last min some could come in.. i suspect many are like me.. i spent years in bethel and am very disappointed and disillusioned by it all.. but at the end of the day i love the bible and think it is the word of god and i don’t see any other religion that comes as close to what jesus describes his true followers or who are fulfilling mat 24:14..

cofty

Good idea thanks DOC

120

Index of Evidence for Evolution Threads

by cofty in

re-posting this for reference.. #1 protein functional redundancy comparing the sequences of amino acids in ubiquitous proteins confirms the relationship between all living things..

#2 dna functional redundancy comparison of the dna that codes for the amino acids of ubiquitous proteins predicts the tree of life with an astonishing degree of accuracy..

#3 ervs endogenous retroviruses that infected our ancestors are found in the same place of the genome of our closest primate cousins..

cofty

Re-posting this for reference.

#1 Protein Functional Redundancy
Comparing the sequences of amino acids in ubiquitous proteins confirms the relationship between all living things.

#2 DNA Functional Redundancy
Comparison of the DNA that codes for the amino acids of ubiquitous proteins predicts the tree of life with an astonishing degree of accuracy.

#3 ERVs
Endogenous retroviruses that infected our ancestors are found in the same place of the genome of our closest primate cousins.

#4 Smelly Genes
Hundreds of broken genes that used to code for olfactory receptors in our ancestors are still found in our genome.

#5 Vitamin C
Why humans can no longer make their own vitamin C and what that tells us about our species' history.

#6 Human Chromosome 2
Our second biggest chromosome is made up of two of our ancestors' chromosomes stuck end-to-end.

#7 Human Egg Yolk Gene
Humans and our primate cousins have the genes for making vitellogenin and they are all broken in the same way.

#8 Jumping Genes
Bits of parasitic code called ALU elements prove our common ancestry with primates.

#9 Less Chewing More Thinking
A broken gene for a type of muscle fibre we no longer have tells a story about our evolutionary past.

#10 Non-Coding DNA
In common with many other species huge amounts of our genome originated as copying errors.

#11 Tiktaalik
An amazing fossil discovery illustrates the transition of life from sea to land.

#12 Lenski's E.coli Experiment
An experiment with E.Coli, now in it's third decade, demonstrates the power of natural selection.

#13 Morris Minor Bonnets
Evolution has to make do with building on existing designs as illustrated by the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

#14 Joey Goes to Oz
Fossil evidence for the origins of marsupials found in Antarctica exactly as predicted.

#15 Robinson Crusoe
The biogeography of oceanic islands presents an impossible dilemma for creationism.

#16 Aquatic Mammals
An excellent sequence of fossils illustrates the evolutionary journey of whales from land to sea.

#17 Belyaev's Silver Foxes
A 50 year breeding programme demonstrates the amazing power of selection and the interconnected nature of genes.

#18 Fish Fingers
The evolution of limbs is mapped out in an amazing sequence of ancient fish fossils.

#19 Goosebumps
A vestigial reflex bequeathed by our hairier ancestors.

#20 Lucy in the Sky...
An exceptional fossil of a 3 million year old hominid.

#21 Footprints in the Sand...
Footprints at Laetoli show our Australopithecus afarensis ancestors were bipedal 3.6 million years ago.

#22 The Hillocks of Hiss...
A vestigial feature if the human ear shared by 10% of the population demonstrates our evolutionary history.

#23 Faunal Succession...
The consistent sequence of fossils found in the rocks can only be explained by evolution.

#24 The Origin of Your Inner Ear...
How the bones that reptiles eat with became the bones that we hear with.

#25 Deep Time...
Scottish geologist Andrew Hutton discovered the proof of earth's great antiquity.

#26 Colour Vision...
How gene duplication - new "information" -and mutation equipped us with trichromatic vision.

#27 Monkeys, Typewriters, Shakespeare, 747s etc...
Evolution is a combination of random mutations and non-random selection.

#28 Something Darwin Didn't Say...
A long term study of pigeons demonstrates how natural selection acts on a local population.

#29 Use it or Lose it...
Fossil genes reveal the history of modern species.

#30 Your Third Eyelid...
The remnants of a nictitating membrane reveals our evolutionary history.

#31 Ten Questions For Creationists ...
The basic facts about reality covered so far pose an impossible challenge to creationism.

#32 Sexual Selection
How female mating preferences led to some of the most remarkable features of living things.

#33 A Tale About Tails
Human embryology reveals our primate history.

#34 Hiccups and Tadpoles
How hiccups are a relic of our amphibian ancestors.

#35 Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Nature's ability to inflict pain and suffering in the battle for survival.

#36 Mass Extinctions
96% of life was wiped out in The Great Dying 250 million years ago.

#37 Testicles
The plumbing of the vas deferens gives evidence of our fish ancestry

#38 The Origin of Complex Cells
How a merger of simple cells made complexity possible

#39 Homologous Structures
Evidence for common ancestry in our shared anatomy.

#40 What Use is Half an Eye?
First steps in the evolution of complex eyes.

92

Chance or intelligent design?

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

cofty could you answer how the single cell came about by chance?.

i know the argument for complexity in nature says natural selection over billions of years but this could not explain the complexity of the single cell the building blocks of life?.

cofty

Hi ExB.

Let me start by making a distinction between evolution and abiogenesis.

We know for absolute certainty that every living thing on earth from humans to haddocks descended from a common ancestor. Natural selection was one of the driving forces in creating the marvellous variety of design we see in the natural world. By design we mean the correlation between form and function. This was the genius of Darwin. He was not the first to propose evolution or common ancestry but he worked out how design arises without a designer - Alfred Wallace came to the same conclusion around the same time but he lacked the rigorous evidence that Darwin had accumulated over decades so they co-published.

Darwin's contribution has stood the test of time but he also got some things wrong. He also lacked knowledge of genetics - the means of inheritance and mutation.

Since Darwin's time multiple fields of science have confirmed the basic fact of common ancestry with astonishing detail. We have thousands of fossils showing the gradual change over millions of years in multiple lineages. One of the most complete lines shows the development of limbs and lungs as fish moved from sea to land. We also have numerous fossils of our own ancestral cousins - please note humans did NOT evolve from monkeys! Humans and primates share a common ancestor. Donald Prothero wrote a great book a few years ago outlining the fossil evidence - there have been so many exciting discoveries in recent years that when he came to update the text for a new edition he ended up writing a whole new book instead.

The most compelling evidence however comes from genetics. The proof of our primate past is of the same sort that is used every day to convict murderers and rapists and settle paternity disputes.

I look forward to discussing some of the specifics with you.

Abiogenesis is a different subject - it is about the origin of life itself, how geochemistry became biochemistry.

There has been a lot of progress in this field in recent years but the final answers are not yet in. The key to the solution is bioenergetics. There is no point showing how all the building blocks of life can arise spontaneously - and they can - unless they process of life can be sustained. The most promising work is being done by Nick Lane and his team at UC London. Very long story short he has shown how hydrothermal vents provide the perfect environment for the origin of life. Every living thing without exception sustains itself with a version of the same process of 'proton power' - a proton gradient across a membrane. Perhaps you remember the Krebs cycle from school biology? Lane has shown how every one of the parts of that process - all the chemical steps - can arise in the alkaline vent environment. It is very complex!

Complex cells such as the kind humans, animals and plants are made of, did not arise for billions of years after more simple life as a result of an event known as endosymbiosis.

For approximately 3 billion years - from 4 to 1 billion years ago - all life consisted of a relatively simple type of cell known as a prokaryote. These are usually round or rod-like with a rigid cell wall. Inside the cell there is very little to see, Their genome is minimal with the DNA arranged in a loop. Everything is streamlined for fast duplication. Given sufficient resources a single bacterium weighing a trillionth of a gram could found a population with a weight equivalent to that of planet earth in two days.

Every living thing you have ever seen from humans to oak trees are made up of more complex cells known as eukaryotes. These are significantly different from prokaryotes. By definition eukaryotes have a nucleus. This is the command centre of the cell where the DNA is kept behind a membrane. Unlike the single circular chromosome of prokaryotes the DNA of eukaryotes is arranged in a number of pairs of straight chromosomes. The genes come in chunks being divided by multiple stretches of random code. As a result many eukaryotes have massive genomes mostly made up of parasitic code. The record is held by the amoebae Amoeba dubia with 670 billion base pairs, 220 times as large as a human. On average eukaryotic cells are 10,000 to 100,000 times larger than prokaryotes although the two spectrums of size do overlap at the extremes.

Just as our bodies contain numerous organs, eukaryotic cells contain a variety of organelles outside of the nucleus. On average a cell contains a few hundred mitochondria that produce ATP, the fuel that powers all of the body's activity.

As early as the 1960s biologist Lynn Margulis proposed the hypothesis that mitochondria were originally free-living, oxygen-breathing bacteria that invaded anaerobic bacteria to their mutual benefit. For decades her ideas met robust opposition but the evidence continued to mount.

Mitochondria closely resemble bacteria in size and shape. In particular they resemble purple-aerobic bacteria.
They both use oxygen in the production of ATP, and they both do this by using the Kreb’s Cycle.
Eukaryotic cells are incapable of producing new mitochondria which replicate by fission just like bacteria not by mitosis like eukaryotes.
Mitochondria have a double membrane. The inner layer is very different from eukaryotes but has the same chemical composition as prokaryotes.
Some types of antibiotics that kill bacteria also inhibit function of mitochondria.
Margulis predicted that if her idea was correct then it would be found that mitochondria have their own DNA. This has also been proven correct. The DNA of mitochondria and chloroplasts is different from that of the eukaryotic cell in which they are found. Just like Kwang Jeon's amoebae gene transfer has occurred between mitochondria and the cell nucleus. More than 99% of genes have been given up by mitochondria with the exception a few genes that are essential to respiration so that power production in a cell can fluctuate to meet immediate demand.

The first appearance of eukaryotic cells is dated to approximately 1.5 billion years ago following a period when earth's oxygen levels rose significantly. The energy production of complex cells set the scene for an amazing radiation of different complex life forms. Bacteria "breathe" through their membrane which puts a practical limit on their size. Hundreds of mitochondria all contributing energy within the same eukaryotic cell opens up new possibilities for evolution and natural selection to explore.

Eukaryotic cells in plants have organelles called chloroplasts that convert energy from the sun into sugars. They too demonstrate all the same sort of evidence that they were once free-living cyanobacteria that merged with another prokaryotic cell through endosymbiosis. There is an interesting example of an intermediate stage of this process in the amoeba Paramecium bursaria that swims around pond water. It swallows photosynthetic green algae but doesn't digest them. When is swims into the light the algae produce sugar which both cells share on the go. It even shares food when they are in darker places where photosynthesis can't take place.

Okay enough for now. I'm going to repost an index to previous threads on evidence for evolution that I have posted previously. I hope you find it helpful.

92

Chance or intelligent design?

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

cofty could you answer how the single cell came about by chance?.

i know the argument for complexity in nature says natural selection over billions of years but this could not explain the complexity of the single cell the building blocks of life?.

cofty

Thanks. I'm at work now but looking forward to responding later.

85

Physically in mentally agnostic ie sitting on the fence

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

hi everyone i’m not pimi or pimo i’m pima.. i don’t think the gb have everything right but i’m sitting on the fence that maybe they do some things.. if the great trib starts i will jump that side of the fence.. this is a definite little sneaky advantage dodging but even by their own doctrine last min some could come in.. i suspect many are like me.. i spent years in bethel and am very disappointed and disillusioned by it all.. but at the end of the day i love the bible and think it is the word of god and i don’t see any other religion that comes as close to what jesus describes his true followers or who are fulfilling mat 24:14..

cofty

but it no the fossil record shows no evolutionary changes at all .. ancient fossils are no change from same creatures today

That is literally like claiming there is no evidence the earth revolves around the sun.

By the way we have an embarrassment of riches in the fossil record demonstrating evolution including humans.

Even if we had no fossils the most compelling evidence is in the DNA on every one of your trillions of cells.

It's very exciting.

85

Physically in mentally agnostic ie sitting on the fence

by ExBethelitenowPIMA in

hi everyone i’m not pimi or pimo i’m pima.. i don’t think the gb have everything right but i’m sitting on the fence that maybe they do some things.. if the great trib starts i will jump that side of the fence.. this is a definite little sneaky advantage dodging but even by their own doctrine last min some could come in.. i suspect many are like me.. i spent years in bethel and am very disappointed and disillusioned by it all.. but at the end of the day i love the bible and think it is the word of god and i don’t see any other religion that comes as close to what jesus describes his true followers or who are fulfilling mat 24:14..

cofty

It is very easy to prove the fact of evolution through numerous fields of science including paleontology and genetics without getting overly complex.

You have read zero books on the topic so how do you think you qualify to reach any conclusion?

Seriously would you like to talk about it on a new thread? I am very happy to help you explore something that all JWs are woefully ignorant of.